Current Research 

This book project engages with a key inquiry, that is – How and why does the military as an institution of empire recruit migrant soldiers and influence their shifting senses of diasporic belonging? As a corollary, how does this multi-scalar relationship in its various permutations cut across the different domains of citizenry, intergenerational flows of migrants, and the mapping out, formation, and sustenance of diaspora? In engaging with these various processes, this monograph addresses how nations and their governance mechanisms shape and determine social constellations and socio-political assertions of belonging and allegiance. I interrogate these core analytical themes by focusing on the Nepali Gurkhas – as military migrants – with the backcloth of military history and historiography. This book therefore offers fresh perspectives on studying migration and diasporic lives. It sets a new agenda by analytically bridging empire, military manoeuvres, and migratory pathways and options as a novel contribution to current scholarship on migration and transnationalism. In doing so, I demonstrate how the security and governance structures of the British empire continue to enact a lasting hold on Gurkha police and soldiers in the present.

As a collaborative project with Suriani Suratman, this study aims to generate important qualitative data about clay artists and practitioners in Singapore. This group is seldom made visible in terms of the work that they do, the craft that they hone in contributing to the wider artistic and cultural landscape of Singapore’s creative industry, and how they also function as a collective community in their individual and communal pursuits. On the basis of narrative interviews, archival research and events participation and observation, we study these clay artists and practitioners in order to analyse the historical trajectory of clay work and their artists, which will also shed important light on cottage and ground-up smaller industries that have formed a part of Singapore’s history and contemporary developments. 

This book project analyses soundscapes in city life across a range of locales in the Asian region and beyond. It considers sonic encounters as meeting points or contact zones where sensory transgressions surface and are contested, negotiated and governed in a plurality of ways. The study builds upon a gamut of data including media reports, noise ordinances, public/ministerial speeches, among others, in unveiling how sounds and noises in everyday life carry social meanings and influence different configurations of socialities across historical and contemporary contexts. 

Human-animal presences in city life is neither a novel nor recent phenomenon. I take different facets of the urban as contact zones between humans and animals and reflect on how such multispecies co-presences and encounters and their concomitant sensory relations shore up boundaries and parameters of spatial use and sensory governance. What sources or avenues of urban sensory governance are there, and how are they invoked, contested, and altered over time in relation to heightened presences of nonhuman actors in urbanity? Through what methodologies can we ascertain and conceptualise urban density and sensory contexts vis-à-vis decibel measurements, spatial limits, and sensorial proximity? The research provides a historical and contemporary purview of human-animal relations in the city as sensory phenomena. By doing so, a range of methodological approaches and data generation on human-animal encounters and urban dwelling will elucidate upon how such co-presences require further reflections and urban planning and governance to manage multispecies city life and urban sensescapes.

This paper consolidates anthropomorphic and transgressive consequences of smells and sounds in Asian colonial urbanities. By analysing archival media reports across different Asian cities in the 1800s and 1900s, I explore the interconnected relations between urban sanitation, space and time vis-a-vis sensory excess. Apart from invading urban residential peace and order, sensory excess and its permeating mobility also pose a threat to and transgression of adequate public health and hygiene. Senses such as smell and sound constitute public nuisance (Howes & Classen 2014). These transgressions precipitate public discourse and municipal action about sanitary ways of conduct. In addition to the maintenance of proper sanitary methods of dealing with waste and other forms of effluvia, these responses are connected to the (desires for) social and legal bracketing of space and time. I make two key observations herein: (1) Regardless of whether sense modalities like sound and smell remain formless, immaterial, fluid, and are expansive in their mobility and permeability, social actors continue to come up with ways to manage these modalities and to contain them. These are accomplished by proposing to legally compartmentalize time and space to limit if not eliminate sensory intrusions. (2) Sensory restraint in the form of discourse and legal intervention serves to protect the interests of particular social groups. Such preferential positioning of one group’s sonic behavior over the other subsequently lays grounds for the justification for introducing legal intervention. Therefore, I critique legal metrics and inadequacies or slippages of sensory governance. Subsequently, these avenues of distinction generate a rethinking of implications that come to bear upon urban living, spatiality, and temporality.

This paper explores the intimate links between food and foodways, sensory experiences, and the manufacturing and sustenance of food heritage in Singapore. Drawing upon a larger project that examined food heritage practices and commensality in two ethnic enclaves, the article focuses on how the senses play a vital role in food heritage constructions that traverse across different scales of experience and analysis. I demonstrate how the senses and their accompanying qualic evaluations play a vital role in food heritage constructions. The broad aim here is to illustrate how food heritage is embodied, participatory, and reconstructed, and shifts across temporalities and varying contexts. By raising sensory awareness that is embroiled within processes of experiencing and re-enacting food heritage, such cognisance throws light onto one’s identity, sense of belonging, and connections to place and nation. The senses are therefore catalytic in pronouncing what food heritage entails, and how one may go about tasting archives and eating heritage. Food heritage is evaluated as an evolving process given how sense experiences may be interpreted differently over a variety of temporal and social contexts.